A car that made you Nash your teeth

Sunday

Jul 7, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Sid McKeen Wry & Ginger

Have I ever told you about the Summer of Blue Smoke?

I can’t remember what year it was, but it had to have been in the mid- to late-1960s. We were young, had two kids, didn’t have a lot of money, and spent our vacations camping. Somehow we got a notion that we ought to have a station wagon, and we spotted one in a used-car lot in Worcester, where we lived in those years. It looked to be in excellent shape, and we bought it.

It was a Rambler, a ’57 if memory serves. Most people called them Nash Ramblers, but they were made by American Motors, a successor to Nash headed by Mitt Romney’s father George, later governor of Michigan and himself once a wannabe president. “A cream puff,” the salesman at the car lot called it.

It ran OK for the first few hundred miles, but about the time we were off on our annual summer vacation, it developed a nasty habit: It began burning oil. I mean, it really burned oil. I asked the dealer about it, and he reminded me gently it was already past warranty. Then he mentioned that some cars had what were called “soft” engine blocks. I realized instantly that I must have been soft in the head to buy it.

We largely spent our vacations in Maine, where I’d grown up, and that summer’s return to Massachusetts quickly turned into the Trip from Hell.

Every time I stepped down on the accelerator, we sent off a blue vapor trail that enveloped the cars behind us. It got so bad that I didn’t dare travel more than 50 miles or so before stopping to get my oil checked.

At my first pit stop, somewhere around Wiscasset, I pulled into a small service station and asked for $5 worth of gas. (This was at a time when you could get almost a tankful for that kind of money, and you didn’t pump it yourself.) Before paying, I casually suggested to the attendant that he “just take a look under the hood.”

His face grayed noticeably as he pulled out the dipstick for the second time and he came back to tell me I needed two quarts of oil. I feigned surprise, then told him to put them in.

An hour or so later — I had cut my speed to 50 — I pulled into a station near Portland after getting car honks and dirty looks from drivers ahead and behind as they choked their way through the smokescreen I was putting down. I knew I didn’t need gas, but I didn’t want to admit to anybody that I was using so much oil that I’d have to stop and get oil alone.

“Give me a couple dollars’ worth,” I told the gas man. “And maybe you’d better check my oil, too, while I’m here.” He told me it was down three quarts. And whistled.

Somewhere near the New Hampshire line, where it was getting harder than ever for us to see out the car windows through the blue haze, I stopped for a dollar’s worth of gas. Then I offhandedly asked the man to take a peek at the oil. He looked surprised but did as he was bid. “My God,” he said finally, “you’re flat empty. You need four quarts.”

When pretty much the same thing happened near Lowell, I confessed to the attendant that I must need an oil change. “Know what?” he said. “If I were you, I’d keep the oil and change the car.” It wasn’t funny at the time, but when I finally got home, that’s just what I did.